The Danish director Thomas Vinterberg tells Marc Lee why his disturbing
new film The Hunt, about a teacher accused of abusing a 5-year-old girl, was
a joy to make.

The Danish film-maker Thomas Vinterberg had never heard of Jimmy Savile, but, in the 24 hours since his arrival in Britain, he reckons the name has cropped up about 25 times. “I just saw a picture of him,” he says. “He looks like a badly exaggerated caricature of a paedophile.”

It’s not surprising that people keep mentioning the Savile scandal to him. Vinterberg’s latest film, The Hunt, is an extraordinarily raw and powerful drama about Lucas, a teacher in a village kindergarten, who is accused of abusing a five-year-old girl. It’s no spoiler to reveal that the alleged offence never took place: the film is more about how the accusation came to be made in the first place and how the community is so ready to believe the lie.

It is also about many other things: marriage (Lucas’s has recently collapsed), parenthood (his teenage son is a stranger to him), male bonding (the men of the village are a close-knit bunch). It also explores the role of the church in the community — and the importance of deer-hunting, a popular ritual in this rural Danish setting.

As the narrative unfolds, Lucas, no longer a hunter, becomes the hunted. Vinterberg, however, has developed some doubts about the metaphor. “I find it slightly banal, actually. I’m not so proud of it: the title is nice and catchy, but I don’t find it very deep. You wouldn’t have to be much above sixth grade to understand it, would you?”

But he believes the community’s passion for the hunt helps to define it. “It’s important that these people have rituals, that there are things they do: they go to church, they go hunting. I wanted them to be so real that you’d believe they actually existed.”

Vinterberg was also at pains to make the events in his story as authentic as possible. Consequently, he relied heavily on transcripts of police interrogations of suspected paedophiles. But what you see in The Hunt, he says, is the “airplane” version, ie something grim enough but nowhere near as horrifying as the real-life cases he researched.

The transcripts came not from Denmark but from other European countries and the US. It’s an intriguing detail because, with The Hunt and Festen — his breakthrough 1998 film about a family blown apart by a patriarch’s abuse of his own children decades earlier — Vinterberg seems to be digging deep into one of the darkest corners of the Danish psyche. But not so, he insists: these are universal themes.

One Danish writer, discussing his work, suggested that he wasn’t advertising the country in a very positive light. “Well, I’m not here to do advertising. I’m a Dane, and I can talk about Denmark in any way I want. I am talking about my own family. I love Denmark: it is a very strong place, but I do know its weaknesses and its dark side, and we should investigate all that.

“Imagine if you’d said to Bergman, 'Don’t make these dark movies about Sweden’, we would have been without a whole treasure trove of films — not that I’m comparing myself to Bergman.”

But what, I wonder, does it feel like, making films such as Festen and The Hunt, having to immerse yourself in such upsetting subject matter for two years or more?

“It’s joyful. Maybe it’s because I’m Scandinavian, or maybe because I feel we are doing something: this is good drama, it is important even. We are trying to create something pure and real. So, doing that, I enjoy my work.

“It’s a bit like an actor playing a villain: it can be great satisfaction if it works, when you see the horrified faces of the audience. Of course, you’re in the darkness [making films like this], but I’m there anyway.”

Meaning? “Meaning I don’t wake up as happy as I look now, meeting the press. This is only skin-deep. And how dark is the film anyway? It’s full of warmth… well, not full of warmth, but it’s there. We tried to put some orange in it: we tried to put some warmth in the church and the woods around the village and the drinking scene at the beginning. But then maybe the darkness conquers all that more than I know.”

At the heart of this darkness is Mads Mikkelsen in the role of the falsely accused teacher. Best known to international audiences as the blood-weeping Bond villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale (2006), Mikkelsen is, says Vinterberg, Denmark’s biggest star.

“He came in rather late and, at that stage, Lucas was more of a tough guy: working-class, a man of few words, independent, strong. I used to compare him to the Robert De Niro character in The Deerhunter. But, when Mads came on board, we both thought it would be interesting to reverse that and make him much more soft, humble, Scandinavian.” Which, I suggest, makes him more believable as a kindergarten teacher.

“Exactly. That was a problem I had struggled with, and I only saw the solution when Mads came in. It’s part of the working process and I’m always dependent on that — reading the actor.”

Mikkelsen won the best-actor prize for The Hunt at Cannes this year; the cinematography was also rewarded. Undeniably, the film is shot with an unflinching intensity, but I make the mistake of suggesting that the film has hints of Dogme 95, the mid-Nineties avant-garde movement pioneered by Vinterberg and his fellow Dane, Lars von Trier, that stripped film-making to the basics.

“Now listen,” says Vinterberg, “Dogme was an attempt to make a naked movie, to undress the movie. It was a rebellion against the conventional, well-dressed movie. But already, at the opening of my film [Festen] in 1998, it was over without me knowing it. In a split second, it became very fancy-dress; it was now Dogme 'style’. I hate it when people say that: 'Oh, this is very Dogme style.’ What the f---? Dogme was meant to be no style.”

But there are scenes in The Hunt where you can barely see what’s happening.

“Are there?” says Vinterberg.

There are some very dark rooms…

“Yes, that’s right. I forgot about that. And you’re right: we do hand-held [camera] stuff. Dogme, for me, was the most uplifting moment I’ve had creatively. It was great fun and heartfelt and self-absorbed and arrogant all at the same time. But it’s over. I felt I did the ultimate movie in that direction, and we couldn’t go further.”

Never one to shy away from controversy, Vinterberg’s next project takes him to Vienna on New Year’s Eve to direct a play he’s written in celebration of alcohol and how good it is for you (allegedly).

“You’ve got the best example in Britain,” he says. “You won a world war with Churchill being drunk all the way through. It’s my belief that you can get further in life with alcohol. But then, of course, you die from it.”